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Thursday, March 19. 2015

Quoting from a news article about a recent startup acquisition in Bangalore:

On the very next day after the acquisition, as many as 20 of the firm’s 50 employees got pink slips from the company, according to a report. The people asked to leave were employed in project management, engineering, user interface, testing and marketing. The reason cited by one of the employees was that the company no longer had suitable roles to offer to the employees.

The lay-offs highlight a dark side of the start-up culture in India, where initially high-profile acquisitions grab headlines, but not much is said about what happens after these deals transpire.

Tuesday, January 27. 2015

Median household income (in 2013 dollars) is $91,702 .However, note that this is not the amount that comes into the bank. The employer deducts the federal tax from this. A rough estimate of the income tax would be 27% (standard deductions, no dependents). This leaves $66942.46 .

After the Federal government takes its cut, the state government levies the state tax on the income. For California this would be 8%. This leaves $61587.06 .

Now let us calculate how many hours someone needs to work to get $61587.06 into the bank. A workday is 8 hours. Mean travel time to work in(minutes), is 25 minutes. Let us assume that he/she gets 21 days of vacation. This means that including the commute hours, subtracting vacation hours and assuming 5 days a week, he/she work 2069.55 hours annually.

So, your hourly earning rate is 61587.06/2069.55 = $29.75. Read that again: the median hourly earning rate is $29.75 . If you do not account for the tax cut and the time you spend in commute, you will believe that your hourly earning rate is 46.65 . However, that is not what an employee earns.

Next, let us see how this converts to buying power. Suppose someone with median income wants to buy shoes with a sticker price $100. The sales tax in California is 8%. What this means is that he/she end up spending $108 on the shoes. To earn $108 , this person needs to work for 3.6 hours.

Friday, January 23. 2015

Here is a heuristic that can give an idea if your job can be automated and might eventually become non existent :

can it be done by a software that has the ability to reason about "maybe" secenario. For example : is it time to replace the light bulbs and in what order should the light bulbs be replaced. Or is this change in the code base dangerous.

Can it be done by a software that can read an ordered list or report (for example: a bug list) and create an accurate representation of the project in a human readable (more precisely, a manager readable) format: are there any blockers for the completion or are there any tickets that can delay the whole project

Saturday, November 29. 2014

Setting up the virtualenv can take a significant amount of time
because it pulls down packages from PyPI. I was surprised that it
does not try to use the locally installed packages. One way to speed
up the rebuild is to use a local caching mirror of PyPI. This can be
accomplished by using devpi.

Friday, October 17. 2014

the more 'ornamented' a person is today, that necessarily detracts from their energy (however insignificantly) to either improve themselves or contribute something new. Not as a rule, but in general the people who have tattoos did not get them to demarcate a significant emotional or symbolic event, but because they need to bolster an otherwise weak sense of identity. It's not just physical markings, either; it could be tattoos, humblebrag facebook statuses, endless numbers heavily filtered selfies on instagram, short-but-intense passion for some political cause, armchair activism, etc. Truly remarkable people tend not to care what others think of them, by virtue of the fact they are fulfilled by the fruits of their precious time and energy.

Tattoos used to mean, ‘get away from me.’ Now they mean, ‘Ask me about my tattoo`